Performative community vs real community

Everyone Wants to Be Part of the Community, But Are We Actually Behaving as Community Members?

I've been sitting with this question for months now, turning it over the way you turn over a stone to see what's living underneath it. And what I keep finding underneath it isn't comfortable.

We talk about community constantly in this world. the healers, the witches, the ancestral workers, the sensitives trying to find their people after a lifetime of not quite fitting anywhere. We build altars to it. We hashtag it. We rent the Airbnbs and light the candles and post the group photos with the caption about sisterhood and lineage and finally belonging. And I understand the hunger behind that, because I have that hunger too. Belonging is not a small thing to want. For a lot of us, it's the thing we've wanted our whole lives.

But somewhere along the way, I think we started confusing the aesthetic of community with the practice of it. And those are not the same thing.

Performative community vs real community...

Community, the real kind, is not a gathering. It's not a retreat, a group chat, a shared hashtag, or a circle of people who all found their way back to the same lineage at the same time. Those things can be part of community. But community itself is something quieter and far less photogenic. It's who shows up when you're not posting anything at all, because you're too tired, too scared, or too broken to. It's who remembers you existed during the season you went dark. It's who you circle back to and say, ‘I couldn't be there for you, but I'm here now’…. not because it's convenient, but because that's what being in relationship actually costs.

Here's the part I think we avoid saying out loud: it is entirely possible to surround yourself with people who feel like community and still not be practicing it. You can have twenty people in your circle who show up for the beautiful, easy parts. the ceremonies, the gatherings, the celebration of finally claiming an identity… and have almost no one who shows up for the parts that aren't beautiful. The financial collapse. The grief that doesn't resolve on schedule. The version of you that isn't glowing.

I think a lot of us, myself included at different points in my life, have been on both sides of this. We've been the person who wanted the identity, the belonging, the beautiful photos of ourselves finally standing inside something we used to feel excluded from …and we've forgotten, in the reaching for that, to look behind us at who helped get us there.  we've also been the ones left standing at the edge of a gathering we helped make possible, watching someone else's version of community happen without us in the frame.

Neither position is a moral failure. But I think it's worth asking ourselves honestly: am I ‘in’ community, or am I performing the shape of it while still operating entirely alone, taking what I need from people and calling it connection?

Real community asks something unglamorous of us. It asks us to remember people when there's nothing to gain from remembering them. It asks us to show up during the ugly seasons, not just the ones that photograph well. It asks reciprocity as a practice, not a performance …quietly, consistently, even when no one's watching to give us credit for it.

I don't think the answer is to stop wanting belonging. I think the answer is to get honest about what belonging actually requires of us, and to start practicing it in the small, unwitnessed moments instead of only the beautiful ones. That's the only kind of community that holds when things get hard. and things always, eventually, get hard.

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A doorway, if you want it: Look at the people you call your community. Who among them would still be there if you had nothing beautiful to offer them right now? And just as importantly — are you that person for someone else?

This essay is part of a larger collection, where we go deeper into this story....in Patreon: Mystic Marrow.

trust yourself,

Natalie